djangosaml2 is a Django application that integrates the PySAML2 library
into your project. This mean that you can protect your Django based project
with a service provider based on PySAML. This way it will talk SAML2 with
your Identity Provider allowing you to use this authentication mechanism.
This document will guide you through a few simple steps to accomplish
such goal.

PySAML2 uses xmlsec1 binary to sign SAML assertions so you need to install
it either through your operating system package or by compiling the source
code. It doesn’t matter where the final executable is installed because
you will need to set the full path to it in the configuration stage.

Now you can install the djangosaml2 package using easy_install or pip. This
will also install PySAML2 and its dependencies automatically.

Actually this is not really required since djangosaml2 does not include
any data model. The only reason we include it is to be able to run
djangosaml2 test suite from our project, something you should always
do to make sure it is compatible with your Django version and environment.

Note

When you finish the configuation you can run the djangosaml2 test suite
as you run any other Django application test suite. Just type
python manage.py test djangosaml2

Then you have to add the djangosaml2.backends.Saml2Backend
authentication backend to the list of authentications backends.
By default only the ModelBackend included in Django is configured.
A typical configuration would look like this:

Before djangosaml2 0.5.0 this authentication backend was
automatically added by djangosaml2. This turned out to be
a bad idea since some applications want to use their own
custom policies for authorization and the authentication
backend is a good place to define that. Starting from
djangosaml2 0.5.0 it is now possible to define such
backends.

Finally we have to tell Django what is the new login url we want to use:

LOGIN_URL = '/saml2/login/'
SESSION_EXPIRE_AT_BROWSER_CLOSE = True

Here we are telling Django that any view that requires an authenticated
user should redirect the user browser to that url if the user has not
been authenticated before. We are also telling that when the user closes
his browser, the session should be terminated. This is useful in SAML2
federations where the logout protocol is not always available.

Note

The login url starts with /saml2/ as an example but you can change that
if you want. Check the section about changes in the urls.py
file for more information.

If you want to allow several authentication mechanisms in your project
you should set the LOGIN_URL option to another view and put a link in such
view to the /saml2/login/ view.

Once you have finished configuring your Django project you have to
start configuring PySAML. If you use just that library you have to
put your configuration options in a file and initialize PySAML2 with
the path to that file.

In djangosaml2 you just put the same information in the Django
settings.py file under the SAML_CONFIG option.

There are several external files and directories you have to create according
to this configuration.

The xmlsec1 binary was mentioned in the installation section. Here, in the
configuration part you just need to put the full path to xmlsec1 so PySAML2
can call it as it needs.

The attribute_map_dir points to a directory with attribute mappings that
are used to translate user attribute names from several standards. It’s usually
safe to just copy the default PySAML2 attribute maps that you can find in the
tests/attributemaps directory of the source distribution.

The metadata option is a dictionary where you can define several types of
metadata for remote entities. Usually the easiest type is the local where
you just put the name of a local XML file with the contents of the remote
entities metadata. This XML file should be in the SAML2 metadata format.

The key_file and cert_file options references the two parts of a
standard x509 certificate. You need it to sign your metadata an to encrypt
and decrypt the SAML2 assertions.

Note

Check your openssl documentation to generate a test certificate but don’t
forget to order a real one when you go into production.

By default, djangosaml2 reads the pysaml2 configuration options from the
SAML_CONFIG setting but sometimes you want to read this information from
another place, like a file or a database. Sometimes you even want this
configuration to be different depending on the request.

Starting from djangosaml2 0.5.0 you can define your own configuration
loader which is a callable that accepts a request parameter and returns
a saml2.config.SPConfig object. In order to do so you set the following
setting:

In the SAML 2.0 authentication process the Identity Provider (IdP) will
send a security assertion to the Service Provider (SP) upon a succesful
authentication. This assertion contains attributes about the user that
was authenticated. It depends on the IdP configuration what exact
attributes are sent to each SP it can talk to.

When such assertion is received on the Django side it is used to find
a Django user and create a session for it. By default djangosaml2 will
do a query on the User model with the ‘username’ attribute but you can
change it to any other attribute of the User model. For example,
you can do this look up using the ‘email’ attribute. In order to do so
you should set the following setting:

SAML_DJANGO_USER_MAIN_ATTRIBUTE = 'email'

Please, use an unique attribute when setting this option. Otherwise
the authentication process will fail because djangosaml2 does not know
which Django user it should pick.

Another option is to use the SAML2 name id as the username by setting:

SAML_USE_NAME_ID_AS_USERNAME = True

You can configure djangosaml2 to create such user if it is not already in
the Django database or maybe you don’t want to allow users that are not
in your database already. For this purpose there is another option you
can set in the settings.py file:

SAML_CREATE_UNKNOWN_USER = True

This setting is True by default.

The other thing you will probably want to configure is the mapping of
SAML2 user attributes to Django user attributes. By default only the
User.username attribute is mapped but you can add more attributes or
change that one. In order to do so you need to change the
SAML_ATTRIBUTE_MAPPING option in your settings.py:

where the keys of this dictionary are SAML user attributes and the values
are Django User attributes.

If you are using Django user profile objects to store extra attributes
about your user you can add those attributes to the SAML_ATTRIBUTE_MAPPING
dictionary. For each (key, value) pair, djangosaml2 will try to store the
attribute in the User model if there is a matching field in that model.
Otherwise it will try to do the same with your profile custom model.

Sometimes you need to use special logic to update the user object
depending on the SAML2 attributes and the mapping described above
is simply not enough. For these cases djangosaml2 provides a Django
signal that you can listen to. In order to do so you can add the
following code to your app:

Your handler will receive the user object, the list of SAML attributes
and a flag telling you if the user is already modified and need
to be saved after your handler is executed. If your handler
modifies the user object it should return True. Otherwise it should
return False. This way djangosaml2 will know if it should save
the user object so you don’t need to do it and no more calls to
the save method are issued.

Congratulations, you have finished configuring the SP side of the federation.
Now you need to send the entity id and the metadata of this new SP to the
IdP administrators so they can add it to their list of trusted services.

You can get this information starting your Django development server and
going to the http://localhost:8000/saml2/metadata url. If you have included
the djangosaml2 urls under a different url prefix you need to correct this
url.

As of SimpleSAMLphp 1.8.2 there is a problem if you specify attributes in
the SP configuration. When the SimpleSAMLphp metadata parser converts the
XML into its custom php format it puts the following option:

Otherwise the Assertions sent from the IdP to the SP will have a wrong
Attribute Name Format and pysaml2 will be confused.

Furthermore if you have a AttributeLimit filter in your SimpleSAMLphp
configuration you will need to enable another attribute filter just
before to make sure that the AttributeLimit does not remove the attributes
from the authentication source. The filter you need to add is an AttributeMap
filter like this:

well SAML authentication is not that simple as a set of credentials you can
put on a login form and get a response back. Actually the user password is
not given to the service provider at all. This is by design. You have to
delegate the task of authentication to the IdP and then get an asynchronous
response from it.

Given said that, djangosaml2 does use a Django Authentication Backend to
transform the SAML assertion about the user into a Django user object.

Why not put everything in a Django middleware class and make our lifes
easier?

Yes, that was an option I did evaluate but at the end the current design
won. In my opinion putting this logic into a middleware has the advantage
of making it easier to configure but has a couple of disadvantages: first,
the middleware would need to check if the request path is one of the
SAML endpoints for every request. Second, it would be too magical and in
case of a problem, much harder to debug.

Why not call this package django-saml as many other Django applications?

Following that pattern then I should import the application with
import saml but unfortunately that module name is already used in pysaml2.